On the 10th of June 2016 students from rooms 28 and 29 finally got to perform their well-practised items to some eager year 1 to 5 children from other classes in Woodend Primary School. This event managed to adopt the nickname “Woodend Primart School’s Fringe Festival”. Was this day a success? To find out if it really was we have to go back to the beginning…
Ms Whelan and Mr Z came up with the idea of this event to get an idea of how well their students could work in a group, resolve conflict, come up with creative ideas, plan, organise and perform. Myself and my classmates accepted this idea with much enthusiasm.
One of the hardest things to do for my group was coming up with our interesting and creative perfomance idea. We were very, very behind. All our ideas were being rejected by the teachers or someone in our group. Our team was falling apart. So many new arguments were breaking out and we thought tht we would never finish. Finally, on the final idea-creating day we were forced to come up with SOMETHING. Somehow we decided that we wanted mask-making to be the workshop and to connect this with our performance we would simply wear masks while we performed our… Our what? Sure lots of groups were doing dances but it seemed to be our only option. Tahli and I knew that we would have to work hard to keep up with the rest of the group.
We found out the hard way that a dance wasn’t the easy way out. We worked hard (and argued) every practise. Mr Z, Ms Whelan and Ms Fisher did help us along our rocky path to success. My team seemed to be behind everyone and couldn’t catch up. Until the dress rehearsals.
The night before the dress rehearsals my group was up until late organising clothes, jewelery, bracelets, music, music players, devices, speeches, arts and crafts, workshop masks and practising our dance. At least our masks were done. My team and I found it harder to perform in front of our classmates than we did on the actual day. Although, in the end the dress rehearsals benefitted us immensely. We weren’t behind anymore. We were going to be ok.
Ticket selling was a nightmare. We only got 7 willing audience membersand most of them were siblings or friends of siblings of people in my group. But Ms Whelan and Mr Z had a plan. They got us 4 classes to perfom for.
The time had come. Performance day was here. But I didn’t have time to stress because Chloe and I had been assigned the job of photographers. I was darting around taking hundreds of photos and short videos of everything I could. Did we end up succeeding? Yes, we did! Sure there were a few stumbles during the dance and using tiny sequins in our workshop was a bad idea but overall our first session was a success. We learnt from the little mistakes in our first session and our second was almost perfect. Although an extra class turned up and Tahli and I couldn’t hole punch their tickets. I learnt a lot about myself and my friends from this performance and was very happy with the end result.
Was this day a success? Yes. I believe it was.
